Patrick O'Carroll, MD, MPH, FACMI

Dr. Patrick OíCarroll received both MD and MPH degrees from Johns Hopkins University in 1983. He went on to complete an internship at Kaiser Hospital in Fontana, CA, and then a preventive medicine residency in 1985 at UCLA. After two years in the CDCís Epidemic Intelligence Service, he moved to the New England Epidemiology Institute at Tufts University for advanced epidemiologic training. He has advanced through the ranks at CDC since 1987 and is now based in Seattle, serving as the Regional Health Administrator for Public Health Service Region X. He also holds the title of Clinical Associate Professor in both the Department of Epidemiology and Health Services and the Department of Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Washington. Dr. OíCarrollís developing informatics interests led him to work with Dr. Andrew Friede on the CDC WONDER project (1992ñ1995), to make CDCís numeric and textual data systems electronically available to state and local public health officials as well as CDC scientists. He subsequently served as lead scientist on the CDC Prevention Guidelines Project to identify and collate all of CDCís various prevention recommendations and guidelines and to make themelectronically available in an indexed and easily searchable way. In 1998, he developed and taught the nationís first graduatelevel course in public health informatics, at the University of Washington School of Public Health. The curriculum for this course essentially defined the nature and scope of public health informatics as a field. More recently, he created and developed a new $30 million/year program at the CDC to create a national emergency public health information networkóthe CDC Health Alert Network. Dr. OíCarrollís excellent book, coauthored with ACMI fellow Bill Yasnoff, is helping to define and to educate a generation of informaticians about the burgeoning field of public health informatics.